Blog

We are constantly striving to make Social Explorer as easy to use as possible, without sacrificing power. And we’re sure you’re going to love the improvements we have made. Buckle up and read on to find out more! Introducing Improved Selection Tools Most Social Explorer users are already familiar with our selection toolbox, whether they’re selecting geographies when creating reports or masking areas of interest. Today, we’re announcing two brand new too... more

Social Explorer's co-founder and president Andrew Beveridge appeared on CNN's Smerconish Show along with Justin Levitt of Loyola Law School this weekend to discuss the ramifications of adding a question about citizenship to the Decennial Census.  Host Michael Smerconish introduced the citizenship question issue: If the Justice Department gets its way, the census takers who go door to door in 2020 will be asking a new question--one about citizens... more

A new article in The Washington Post features Social Explorer co-founder and president Andrew Beveridge. In "Potential citizenship question in 2020 Census could shift power to rural America," reporter Michael Scherer writes about the renewed push for the Census Bureau to count citizens and its potential impact: A request by the Justice Department to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census could shift the nation’s balance of political power from cities t... more

Yesterday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the state’s congressional district map on the grounds that it was too partisan. Social Explorer Co-Founder and CEO Andrew Beveridge contributed to an amicus brief for the trial filed by the law firm Paul Weiss. Professor Beveridge is a nationally recognized research scholar in the area of redistricting and an expert on drawing district lines. In a five to two opinion, the judges wrote that the boundaries "clearly, plainl... more

You can now explore the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) environment data in Social Explorer's reports and maps. NHGIS computed 2001, 2006 and 2011 land cover summaries for counties and census tracts from satellite imagery or aerial photography by assigning each pixel to a type of land cover, such as vegetation, wetlands, water, etc. (Learn more about the data source here.) Data scientists at Social Explorer prepared all the land cover summaries. These dat... more

Population equality is the main criteria for creating legislative districts in the US, but many political forces, fortified by the Trump administration, could drastically alter how people are counted and how districts are drawn. The Talking Points Memo article "Trump DOJ Could Effectively Be Reviving A Long-Term Attack On Voting Rights" by Tierney Sneed delves into the issues from court challenges to agency leadership. Social Explorer's Andrew Beveridge comments on the... more

Every ten years, the US Census Bureau undertakes an incredibly difficult, yet immensely important task - counting all the people living in the United States and recording the most essential demographic information such as age, sex, and race.  Looking at change over time for a specific area is a challenge many researchers face today. What makes this task difficult are changes in geographies as well as changes in Census variables, as Census questionnaires and tabulations change fro... more

The Census Bureau's newly released five-year American Community Survey (ACS) dataset is now available on SocialExplorer.com. Subscribers can access the new data through our maps and reports. Explore the latest data in over 200 tables on dozens of topics. The ACS is an extensive annual survey administered by the Census Bureau to a sample of about three million households nationwide. The data includes variables on income, race, ancestry, health insu... more

On December 12th, Alabamans will elect a new senator to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. As our historical election maps show, Alabama has been a historically red state, with exclusively Republican senators for the past 20 years. The following map depicts the most recent senatorial election results from 2016.  (Scroll over shaded areas to see votes by county.) The nation’s attention is on this upcoming Special Election because it could close... more

Social Explorer has been named the Best New End User Product in the Charleston Advisor's sixteenth annual Readers’ Choice Awards! The Charleston Advisor publishes critical reviews of online resources for libraries, and the Readers’ Choice Awards recognize the best digital services for academia.  The editors praised SocialExplorer.com for being “powerful, intuitive, and easy to use,” calling the site “one of the best products a library... more